Alexandra Daw

“LOSS
'Sorry for your loss, they say. And I want to know what they mean, because it's not just my boys I've lost. I've lost my motherhood, my chance to be a grandmother. I've lost the easy conversation of neighbours and the comfort of family in my old age. Every day I wake to some new loss that I hadn't thought of before, and I know that soon it will be my mind.'
Vivienne Blackman, 1915”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

“And alongside this decision there was some forfeiture in the thought he found unsettling: that for every pound of weight they’d carried across their backs, for every drop of sweat that had poured off, no inch of this land was theirs. As long as they stayed, they were no better than the others, kept on the borders of town, hidden among the trees just like their brothers and sisters. And it grew clear that the only path to a life worth living would be found elsewhere, where they might not have more but could not possibly have less.”
― Nathan Harris, The Sweetness of Water

“Was it more obscene to say it, to write it, or to set it in type? On the breath it could taken by a breeze or crowded out by chatter; it could be misheard or ignored. On the page it was a real thing. It had been caught and pinned to a board, its letters spread in a particular way so that anyone who saw it would know what it was.”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

“The noises of society fending off despair with routine.”
― Nathan Harris, The Sweetness of Water